Sona creates work across theater, oral storytelling, shadow puppetry, multimedia, and participatory experience.

After returning to her family’s home in Aleppo during the Syrian war, Sona discovers a trunk of shadow puppets made by her great-great-grandfather more than a century earlier. The puppets refuse to remain artifacts. They interrupt her account, expose what she has failed to understand, and pull her through family testimony, Armenian history, A Thousand and One Nights, the ongoing imprisonment of her friend Osman Kavala, and her own buried story.

Combining live performance, ancestral shadow puppetry, indigenous music, and moving image, AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) moves through personal memory, inherited history, and Karagöz’s irreverent comedy to ask how the stories we carry shape what we are able to see.

AZAD received its sold-out world premiere at San Francisco’s Potrero Stage from April 11 through May 3, 2025, co-produced by Hakawati and Golden Thread Productions.

Following its critically acclaimed world premiere, the work is being developed for its next major production.

The inquiry developed through AZAD became the foundation of the Scher/AZAD Method.

A live, kaleidoscopic journey through rupture, survival, and the stories we inherit.

Sona weaves the rediscovery of her family’s 180 shadow puppets with Armenian family history, Karagöz comedy, A Thousand and One Nights, and the question of how trauma is transmitted—and whether story can change our relationship to what we inherit.

Azad Storytelling is the foundational work from which AZAD (the rabbit and the wolf) grew. The performance has been presented at the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, the University of Michigan, the Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Clark University, and the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont McKenna College.

Available for universities, museums, cultural institutions, conferences, and community gatherings.

A communal cultural experience weaving together storytelling, live music, food, meditation, and celebration.

Inspired by A Thousand and One Nights and its courageous storyteller, Scheherazad, the experience celebrates the pluralism, humor, wisdom, and artistry of West Asia. It responds to the region’s reduction to a single story with multiplicity, beauty, and human encounter.

Co-created by Sona Tatoyan and Isaac Saboohi. Presented in Los Angeles and Armenia.

Refuge(e), Illuminated is an immersive performance-installation built around 180 Ottoman shadow puppets belonging to Abkar Knadjian, who carried them from Urfa to Aleppo while fleeing the Armenian Genocide.

Visitors traverse the same road twice: first as a route of Silk Road exchange, then as the path of the 1915 deportations. As the spatial and sensory environment changes around them, so does their perception of the journey, until the road opens onto deep time at Göbekli Tepe.

Visitors are invited to encounter refugees not only as people seeking refuge, but as carriers and creators of it—through memory, humor, craft, story, and imagination—before finally becoming storytellers and listeners themselves. The experience asks: What refuge do each of us seek? What refuge can we create for one another? And what kind of future might that make possible?

For presenting, touring, commissioning, and creative collaboration inquiries, please get in touch.

Member, Actors’ Equity Association. Selected credits: world premieres of José Rivera’s Brainpeople (American Conservatory Theater), Massacre (Sing to Your Children) (The Goodman Theatre), and Boleros for the Disenchanted (Yale Repertory Theatre), for which she received a 2009 Connecticut Critics Circle Acting Award. Starred in The Journey, the first American independent feature shot in Armenia, Audience Award at the 2002 Milan International Film Festival.

Training: William Esper Studio with Bill Esper, Sanford Meisner Technique. BA in Theatre, Wake Forest University, Caroline Award for Excellence in Acting.